James Conroy's book brings to life the unsuccessful peace conference of the Civil War.

By Jody Feinberg The Patriot Ledger

The details are so sharp and complete that you might think lawyer James Conroy was a Civil War reporter in a past life. After four years of work, last spring Conroy welcomed the publication of his first book, “Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865” (Lyons Press, Guildford, Connecticut).

“I love history and I’ve always wanted to make a contribution to history,” said Conroy, the former Hingham assistant town moderator. “I wanted to find a subject that hadn’t been done before. It sounds sort of cocky, I probably know more about this than anyone.”

His contribution was recognized by the Massachusetts Historical Society, which recently elected him a fellow.

The conference – which lasted just four hours on February 3, 1865 – was an attempt by President Lincoln and his secretary of state to meet with Confederacy Vice-President Alexander Stephens and two other Confederacy leaders to negotiate an end to the Civil War. It was a risky move for Lincoln, who desperately wanted the bloodshed to stop.

“He invested a lot of his personal capital just agreeing to do it,” Conroy said. “The very idea of sitting down with a Confederate to negotiate was a scandal.”

Using letters, memoirs, journals and newspaper accounts, Conroy tells the story of the conference from its genesis to its aftermath. It’s ultimately a story of people – how their personalities, ideas, and convictions shaped a conference that had the potential to save lives and reduce acrimony between the North and the South.

Exceptionally well-documented, the book challenges common knowledge about Lincoln; at the peace conference, he spoke of gradual emancipation of the slaves and compensation for the slave owners.

“I was really trying to get to know them and make them come alive and tell the story through the people who were living it,” Conroy said. “We’ll never know, but if a way could have been found to end the war by agreement, rather than conquest, there might have been an easier reconstruction and reunion. Instead, there was tremendous hostility that still hasn’t completely gone away.”

In fact, Conroy found the topic compelling in part because of parallels he sees with the United States today.

“One of the reasons I wrote this book was to speak to the terrible polarization and bitterness between the right and left now, which is partly a North and South divide,” said Connolly, who has been a press secretary, chief of staff, and speech writer in Washington, D.C.

A founding partner of the Boston law firm Donnelly Conroy and Gelhaar, and a Hingham resident since 1981, Connolly devoted nearly all his free time to the book, spending hours at The Athenaeum in Boston.

“It took twice as long as I expected, longer than it took to fight the Civil War,” he joked. “It was a labor of love that took a lot of discipline.”

When Conroy speaks to audiences, he recounts that the brief treatment of the conference in a book by Civil War historian Shelby Foote set him on his journey. When he did research to learn more, he discovered no one else had written a book that fully explored the conference.

“What grabbed my attention was the scene where he (Foote) writes about the three Southern peacemakers coming across the siege line and the soldiers on both sides cheering for peace,” said Conroy, who uses Civil War images to illustrate his talk. “I thought that was very dramatic and emotive.”

Nonetheless, Lincoln wasn’t optimistic, and the failure to reach any agreement confirmed his lack of hope. He and the Confederate representatives left the conference with proposals, but couldn’t win support from their cabinets.

“It’s hard for us to conceive of the scale of the war. Over 700,000 dead in a population that was dramatically smaller than ours,” Connolly said. “There’s this overwhelming sense of tragedy in the fact that the politicians were not able to find a way to get out of the war. They were dug in on their positions and couldn’t find a way to get past the hatred on both sides.”

Jody Feinberg may be reached at jfeinberg@ledger.com or follow on Twitter @JodyF_Ledger.